04.29.08
Posted in Business at 7:41 am by Administrator
Two of the foremost afflictions of this post-American Century — rising food costs and rising fuel prices — have people all over the world raging, demonstrating, even rioting against their governments, the oil companies and the oil-exporting countries. Why are there no riots on Wall Street, where they belong?
American truckers jammed Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. with their big rigs the other day, blowing their horns in anger at the U.S. Government. They were on the wrong street, in the wrong town.
The price of gas at the pumps has no direct relationship to supply and demand, or to the cost of production, or to any of the other Economics 101 claptrap that the daily commentators and spinmeisters gurgitate and regurgitate. (They have recently invented a new weasel word: “on.” Oil prices rose today, they like to say, “on” fears of new attacks in the Nigerian oil fields. Thus they suggest that the fears of attacks that did not happen affected the price offered by refiners and accepted by producers of oil, which is pure hokum.)
Instead, the price of oil rises and falls “on” the daily stampedes created by speculators in futures contracts, who do not intend to and never do take delivery of a gallon of oil, but instead dabble in the buying and selling of contracts for oil in order to make unearned money. The speculators and their agents get up in the morning determined to move money, and nothing does that better than igniting a juicy fear about a pipeline or an oil field. You touch a match to the rumor, call your clients and blow on the embers until their hair is on fire, and bingo, you’ve moved a couple million dollars and your commission buys baby a new Beamer.
Good as they are, the Masters of the Universe (thank you, Tom Wolfe) cannot come up with a move-the-money oil crisis every day, but now they have a new gig. Food crisis! Instead of oil you’re never going to burn, buy food you’ll never eat! Fear of a drought in Australia, it turns out, moves as much money as fear of a terrorist attack in Nigeria. Of course, this is what the Chicago Board of Trade has been doing for decades with futures contracts on corn and wheat and soybeans and “pork bellies” (bacon) and whatever commodity will support the notion that something — a frost in Brazil, a grasshopper infestation in Saskatchewan — is about to cause prices to skyrocket.
But what is going on now is different by an order of magnitude. According to Bloomberg News, “The buying of crop futures alone is about half the combined value of the corn, soybeans and wheat grown in the U.S., the world’s largest exporter of all three commodities.” (Wall Street Grain Hoarding Brings Farmers, Consumers Near Ruin. April 29, 2008)
What’s happening to us — the people who have to eat and buy gas — these days is not that oil or food is running out (that day is coming, for certain, but is not here yet) but that oceans of money are suddenly sloshing around the commodities markets. It’s the same tide of money that burst the housing bubble; it flowed there on the infantile belief that housing prices would rise forever and ever, amen. People speak of the “silent tsunami” that is bringing famine to people all over the planet, but they are missing the tsunami of money that is the root of this evil.
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04.25.08
Posted in Politics at 7:07 am by Administrator
The campaign to determine who will get the job as the new captain of the Titanic — the ship being dead in the water and listing badly by the bow — continues, accompanied by the sound of water rushing into the lower decks.
We the passengers are asked to choose among: a candidate who claims to be the most experienced because she is married to a sea captain; a candidate who has never been to sea but speaks eloquently of his hope that things will work out all right; and an old salt who recommends that we lighten the ship by throwing all the poor people overboard. Read the rest of this entry »
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03.11.08
Posted in War and Terrorism at 7:45 am by Administrator
If a man who smokes three packs of cigarettes a day announces that by a surge of willpower he has cut down to two packs a day, how long should the celebration last?
If an administration announces that, in the second-longest war in the history of the nation, a surge of troops into Iraq has “worked” — you know, as in “mission accomplished” — how happy should we be? Read the rest of this entry »
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02.26.08
Posted in Politics at 7:48 am by Administrator
When a country’s currency becomes corrupted, all economic transactions are affected; when its language is devalued, everything is tainted. Witness the poison cloud of spin surrounding the latest flap about John McCain. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.14.08
Posted in Environment at 12:32 pm by Administrator
The idea that the United States, the world’s single largest energy consumer, can be independent of the $5 trillion-per-year energy business — the world’s single biggest industry — is ludicrous on its face. The push for energy independence is based on a series of false premises.
The man who wrote the above in the Washington Post this Sunday — Robert Bryce — is a fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, a wholly-owned and -operated subsidiary of Big Oil. The institute’s other activities include denying the existence of global climate change, and insisting that there’s enough oil and coal for everybody, forever. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.07.08
Posted in Politics at 8:56 am by Administrator
With so many candidates in the field, and so may pundits talking endlessly about them, why is it that the fundamental truths of American politics remain so far in the shadows?
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post gets a firm grip on the little toe of one of these central ideas when he points out that the “media” failed to predict Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa because, silly geese, they thought money was the only important thing in politics. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.02.08
Posted in Politics at 4:02 pm by Administrator
The clearest and most consistent ethical positions being taken by any candidate for President are those espoused by John Edwards. He, more pointedly and unabashedly than any other candidate, affirms the first purpose of government: to protect from harm those who cannot protect themselves. He correctly points out, without apology or qualification, that big corporations and those who have been made wealthy by big corporations are today doing the most harm to the most people in this country, and that they have successfully disabled the government agencies that are supposed to rein them in. Read the rest of this entry »
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10.27.07
Posted in Environment at 7:27 am by Administrator
The Tragedy of the Commons is a phrase used to describe a human characteristic noted by thinkers since Aristotle. It holds that when a commonly-held resource begins to run out (the name derives from what communal pastures were called in England), the typical response will be not to come to some agreement to limit the use of the resource, but for each individual to grab as much of what’s left as possible. For example, whenever there is a threat of a gasoline shortage, it is usually made worse by the fact that many people rush to fill their tanks and their reserve tanks before they need to. The phrase — really an elevated way of describing greed — describes a concept important to every aspect of our discussion, but perhaps with most pungency when it comes to water. Read the rest of this entry »
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09.19.07
Posted in Business at 8:55 am by Administrator
In a quarter-century, China has progressed from being an American businessman’s worst nightmare (Imagine! All that control!) to embodying his fondest dream (Imagine! No controls!).
What U.S. corporations want, and have come closer to getting under the current Bush administration than ever before, is the freedom to make money no matter what the cost to others. But the wheels have come off the Bush administration, thanks to the usual gang of spoilers — a free press, opposition political parties, well-heeled and -organized advocates for various non-corporate causes such as the environment or poor people, an independent judiciary, and a citizenry that, however sluggishly, still reacts unfavorably to attacks on its Constitution. Read the rest of this entry »
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09.11.07
Posted in War and Terrorism at 7:40 am by Administrator
In discussing his commission’s otherwise clear-eyed assessment of conditions in Iraq, former Marine commandant General James L. Jones swallows whole and regurgitates a Presidential talking point on the war. “If we are perceived to have failed,” says the general, “there will be an increase in terrorism.”
This is the President’s excuse of last resort for a war of choice that he foisted on America with lies so massive and blatant that relatively few can convince themselves to this day that he actually said them. Read the rest of this entry »
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